Network-enabled applications are applications that use communication networks to share information between various devices, each of which might be operated by the same or different user(s). The network-enabled applications include applications such as browser engines, messaging interfaces, remote desktops, and the like that allow users to easily browse, select, and manipulate items being viewed using a network-enabled application. The network-enabled application receives one or more communications (such as code for instantiating webpages) from a service provider that is often encoded in the form of a language (such as the hypertext markup language HTML), which contains elements that describe the structure and functionality of the content that is received by the content user.
An internet browser is an example of a content browser that allows users to easily browse and select items being viewed using the browser. The content browser receives one or more communications (such as webpages) from a service provider that is often encoded in the form of a markup language, which describes the structure and functionality of the content that is received by the content user.
The communication (such as a received webpage) often references resources that are hosted by third party service providers. One of the primary reasons external resources are used is to limit the amount of locally developed software and/or to reduce bandwidth requirements of hosting certain kinds of content (e.g., video content). However, the use of external resources often diminishes the integrity of the intended user interface when the external resources fail to load. For example, when an external resource fails to load (and/or stalls), conventional browsers do not provide a convenient way for web developers to provide alerts that is not resource specific. This problem is compounded when multiple external resources are presented simultaneously using “widget-heavy” webpages because, for example, the resource-specific solutions for detecting that third party content has failed to load are normally not portable and do not provide generic solutions that are useable without modification across a variety of platforms.